This past week’s puzzle, as previously posted:
This week’s puzzle is really straightforward: how many distinct “word-tile game” dictionary words can you find in the word search grid below?
The challenge? The grid is randomly generated using a slightly modified frequency distribution of standard English language texts. That is, E happens about 12% of the time, Q right around 0.095% of the time, etc.
Congratulations to Earl Martin for being drawn at random from among the correct (or at least reasonably well-reasoned) answers submitted this week.
Depending upon the dictionary or word list used, your actual count of words may vary. From the word list I used, there were a total of 693 distinct words present in the word grid, broken out as follows:
| 1-letter | 2 words |
| 2-letters | 82 words |
| 3-letters | 388 words |
| 4-letters | 191 words |
| 5-letters | 21 words |
| 6-letters | 5 words |
| 7-letters | 2 words |
| 8-letters | 1 word |
| 9-letters | 1 word |
The words with 6 or more letters were: beetle, bennis, murder, reefed, tenter, cryogen, fortune, murderer, and cryogenic.
Thanks to everyone that submitted a response, and many thanks to the team at ThinkGeek for supplying our weekly prize!
